By the time Yogesh Chander Deveshwar—Yogi to his colleagues on the board—is to step down in April 2012, he will have spent more than 15 years as chairman of ITC, India's largest tobacco company. That's easily the longest tenure in ITC's history. But that's not a sobriquet that Deveshwar really cares about. For the past decade he's been transforming ITC from a cigarette maker to a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company. In the last three years he's really upped the ante—and taken on a plethora of global and local rivals including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Britannia, Nestlé and Parle Agro, all at one go. The company's five-year plan envisions a nearly fourfold growth in revenues.

All figures are in U.S. dollars. Market value as of Sept. 1.1 - Annualized2 - Annualized; projected over next three to five years.3 - Combined market value for Rio Tinto Ltd. and Rio Tinto Plc. (a dual-listed company with headquarters in Australia and the U.K.)
NA - Not availableSources: Interactive Data, LionShares, Thomson IBES and Worldscope via FactSet Research Systems; Bloomberg.Photo: NA